The present invention generally provides improved surgical and/or robotic devices, systems, and methods.
Minimally invasive medical techniques are aimed at reducing the amount of extraneous tissue which is damaged during diagnostic or surgical procedures, thereby reducing patient recovery time, discomfort, and deleterious side effects. Millions of surgeries are performed each year in the United States. Many of these surgeries can potentially be performed in a minimally invasive manner. However, only a relatively small number of surgeries currently use these techniques due to limitations in minimally invasive surgical instruments and techniques and the additional surgical training required to master them.
Minimally invasive telesurgical systems for use in surgery are being developed to increase a surgeon's dexterity as well as to allow a surgeon to operate on a patient from a remote location. Telesurgery is a general term for surgical systems where the surgeon uses some form of remote control, e.g., a servomechanism, or the like, to manipulate surgical instrument movements rather than directly holding and moving the instruments by hand. In such a telesurgery system, the surgeon is provided with an image of the surgical site at the remote location. While viewing typically a three-dimensional image of the surgical site on a suitable viewer or display, the surgeon performs the surgical procedures on the patient by manipulating master control input devices, which in turn control the motion of robotic instruments. The robotic surgical instruments can be inserted through small, minimally invasive surgical apertures to treat tissues at surgical sites within the patient, such apertures resulting in the trauma typically associated with open surgery. These robotic systems can move the working ends of the surgical instruments with sufficient dexterity to perform quite intricate surgical tasks, often by pivoting shafts of the instruments at the minimally invasive aperture, sliding of the shaft axially through the aperture, rotating of the shaft within the aperture, and/or the like.
The servomechanism used for telesurgery will often accept input from two master controllers (one for each of the surgeon's hands) and may include two or more robotic arms or manipulators. Mapping of the hand movements to the image of the robotic instruments displayed by the image capture device can help provide the surgeon with accurate control over the instruments associated with each hand. In many surgical robotic systems, one or more additional robotic manipulator arms are included for moving an endoscope or other image capture device, additional surgical instruments, or the like.
A variety of structural arrangements can be used to support the surgical instrument at the surgical site during robotic surgery. The driven linkage or “slave” is often called a robotic surgical manipulator, and exemplary linkage arrangements for use as a robotic surgical manipulator during minimally invasive robotic surgery are described in U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 61/654,764 filed Jun. 1, 2012, entitled “Commanded Reconfiguration of a Surgical Manipulator Using the Null Space”, and U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,758,843; 6,246,200; and 5,800,423, the full disclosures of which are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety. These linkages often make use of a parallelogram arrangement to hold an instrument having a shaft. Such a manipulator structure can constrain movement of the instrument so that the instrument shaft pivots about a remote center of spherical rotation positioned in space along the length of the rigid shaft. By aligning this center of rotation with the incision point to the internal surgical site (for example, with a trocar or cannula at an abdominal wall during laparoscopic surgery), an end effector of the surgical instrument can be positioned safely by moving the proximal end of the shaft using the manipulator linkage without imposing dangerous forces against the abdominal wall. Alternative manipulator structures are described, for example, in U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,594,912, 6,702,805; 6,676,669; 5,855,583; 5,808,665; 5,445,166; and 5,184,601, the full disclosures of which are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
While the new robotic surgical systems and devices have proven highly effective and advantageous, still further improvements would be desirable. In some cases, it is desirable to change portions or all of manipulator assemblies, where a manipulator assembly may include a tool (e.g., a surgical tool) connected to a manipulator (e.g., robotic arm). For example, it may be desirable to change a robotic arm from a parallelogram arrangement that structurally constrains movement about a remote center to an alternative manipulator structure that uses, e.g., software control to constrain movement about the remote center. For another example, it may be desirable to change a tool connected to a manipulator from, e.g., one with clamping jaws to one with an endoscope.
In any event, a different manipulator assembly will often have different characteristics, such as a different number of degrees of freedom, different types of degrees of freedom, etc. Accordingly, the same controller for controlling the different manipulator assemblies cannot be used, but rather a different controller that performs, e.g., calculations in joint space, must be used that is customized to each specific tool and/or manipulator. The use of different controllers results in added layers of complexity that make the system more prone to error, and may effectively limit the use of new manipulators and/or tools with a preexisting system. While some techniques for providing system compatibility with new tools have been disclosed, such as those discussed in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/114,082 filed May 2, 2008 (now U.S. Pat. No. 7,983,793), entitled “Tool Memory-Based Software Upgrades for Robotic Surgery,” the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, further improvements are still desired.
For these and other reasons, it would be advantageous to provide improved devices, systems, and methods for surgery, robotic surgery, and other robotic applications. It would be particularly beneficial if these improved technologies provided the ability to conveniently switch between different types of manipulators and/or tools in an error-free fashion while keeping system complexity and costs low.